OK, frankly, all you get this time are apologies. I'm sorry I haven't been writing anything to anybody recently (with the possible exception of text messages -- you have no idea how great it is to get text messages from the States), but I'm working on it. As it turns out, I have very little time during training for much besides learnin' stuff. But I've also discovered that it's very hard to write for you. Explaining life to you requires me to be in two mental places at one time -- the Unites States and Senegal.
Tomorrow, I leave Thies to visit Ndiago, the small village in the Kaolack region (find it on a map for extra elephant points!) that will be my home for the next two years. The current PCV I'm replacing and I are going to hang out for a few days, and she'll introduce me to all the 271 people living in Ndiago. I'll probably get a new name as well. During training, I am Issa Sene, a name given to me by my host family. Funny story -- apparently it's a boy's name meaning Jesus.
Anyway, I'm hoping to come back from my village with a new determination to share my life in Senegal with you. I may have said this before, but I'm radiantly happy here. The only thing that would make it any better would be if I could magically be sharing it with you -- or at least find the will to write more. Soon, soon.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
NO TIME TO WRITE
Hey guys. I promise you'll get a more substantive update within two weeks, but I don't have much time to say anything right now. Basically, I'm too busy falling in love with Senegal to pay attention to you right now. BUT I have a phone. Feel free to send me a text message, though it'll be expensive. The number is 221 77 671 99 52.
Anyway, I'm healthy and exceptionally happy. Like, woah-happy. I'm off to the village of Thieneba for 10 days or so, but after that I'll post some stuff.
Love and guts.
Anyway, I'm healthy and exceptionally happy. Like, woah-happy. I'm off to the village of Thieneba for 10 days or so, but after that I'll post some stuff.
Love and guts.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Just a quick note.
So I stuck my address in the little side-bar thingie. I'll be there until the end of April, when training will end and I'll head out to my village.
I'm in Philly tonight, and in the last few days I've passed through Baltimore, D.C., and New York. Tomorrow, the rest of my staging group and I will get packed into a bus and driven back to New York City, where we'll get on some crazy plane and fly to Senegal. While I'd love to tell you all how I feel about this, at the moment I need to do some re-packing. But I will say that I've loved seeing some of my friends in the last few days, and the memories of some of the things I've done and said and heard in that time will follow me around for a while. In a good way.
I'll try to post again before the flight tomorrow afternoon, but no guarantees.
Also, tonight I ate my first Philly cheese steak sandwich. I wanted falafel and a cupcake, but life is like that sometimes.
I'm in Philly tonight, and in the last few days I've passed through Baltimore, D.C., and New York. Tomorrow, the rest of my staging group and I will get packed into a bus and driven back to New York City, where we'll get on some crazy plane and fly to Senegal. While I'd love to tell you all how I feel about this, at the moment I need to do some re-packing. But I will say that I've loved seeing some of my friends in the last few days, and the memories of some of the things I've done and said and heard in that time will follow me around for a while. In a good way.
I'll try to post again before the flight tomorrow afternoon, but no guarantees.
Also, tonight I ate my first Philly cheese steak sandwich. I wanted falafel and a cupcake, but life is like that sometimes.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
AND! Other stuff going in the bag.
So here are a couple shots of some of the junk I'll be packing for Africa. Not all of this is coming along, thankfully. Mom'll ship some of this stuff after I get to Senegal.
A lot of these things were gifts. In particular, Julia L. was super lovely and generous and helped me out with that humongous orange beautiful pack. Andy, Rehana, and Micah found me a Dana Alphasmart magic word maker thing, which will allow me to do a lot of writing in the comfort and privacy of my own hut. Christine got me an, ahem, feminine urinary director. It may be one of the best things ever. I'm bringing a lot of spices, since the diet in Senegal's fairly boring, a lot of duct tape, and two years' worth of toothbrushes. Good-quality soccer balls may be difficult to find in small villages, too, so I thought it would make a good gift to some kids. The colored pencils, drawing paper, and card games are also for the kids I meet.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
So I'm working on a list of books to bring.
It's hard for me to address the ways books are important to me. They've been a constant presence in my life for as long as I can remember, and of course I went to That Book College and all that.
But it's more than an intellectual thing with me. As I was thinking about this list and flipping through the pages of some of the books I have read before, I found myself seeing again the last occasion I had to read them. In the pages of my copy of Euclid's Elements, I found tons of scrawled margin notes that didn't necessarily relate to the propositions. Little clever or funny things my classmates and tutor had said, reminders and lists of things to do, and random thoughts about Sophocles danced up and down the page next to doodles of sad clowns (an illustration my friends and I used to personify the reductio ad absurdum). In another book, I found a handful of doodles of stick figures playing in the snow, undoubtedly sketched as my thoughts drifted in class to the weather outside. In another, I had tucked a separate piece of paper covered in notes and questions focusing on a notion that would later turn into my freshman essay. Exclamation points and excited scrawl are all over all my books, and encountering these messages from my personal past is enthralling.
It is not only a younger version of myself that I encounter in these books. Some of my dearest friends, the people I love the most, pop out of these pages. Sometimes I come to a passage in a text and am overwhelmed by the memory of my friends and I laughing about it while doing the reading out on the quad, or wondering over it in Seminar, or laboring over it next to that blackboard up on the top floor of the Barr-Buchanan Center. Sometimes these passages bring one person back to me, and sometimes they bring many. But they are always a reminder of the people I have met and loved so far in life, of the things we shared in speech. And then my thoughts turn to the new books, the ones I haven't read yet. I wonder whose words I will record in their pages, who will share the jokes and the discoveries and the wonder of these books with me?
I’m being a little sentimental, I know. But you should be nice to me, because I leave the continent in nine days. Yeesh.
And while I’m at it, I thought of a phrase I like to talk about going from St. John's College to the Peace Corps: "Going from the life of the mind to the life of the hands and heart." Cheesyawesomegoodness.
*****
And now, The Book List. Of course, I'm going to be adding and subtracting from this list a fair bit in the next few days, but just in case you're as obsessive about reading as I am, here you go....
Books I'm reading now and hoping to finish before departure, but might end up coming along for the ride:
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha (If I finish in time, I'll send it to my dad. Hi, Dad!)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame (a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, who is becoming something of a hero of mine -- he was into Kant and the United Nations! like me! yeah!)
The real list (sort of kinda maybe):
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves
Proust, Swann's Way
Love in the Time of Cholera, possibly other stuff by Marquez too
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (I acquired a soft, squishy spot for this guy back in the days of freshman lab class)
Plato, The Republic - The Joe Sachs translation!
Thoreau, Walden
The Bible -- RSV, the version I read in sophomore year at SJC. Not as a person of faith, so much as a person who likes reading Job and some other bits quite a lot. Plus, as with any book I read at SJC, my margin notes will be a constant source of amusement/horror/humility.
Lonely Planet's guide to Senegal
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (it makes me squirm, and it touches on some stuff I've been thinking about a lot lately)
Guns, Germs, and Steel (started, never finished)
The Pleasures of Exile, by George Lamming. I don't know anything about this book.
Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. See my first blog entry for some background on my ridiculous crush on Paul Farmer.
And in a true nod to SJC, two books I want to work through again:
Euclid's Elements (ugh, but it's so heavy)
The Greek manual (uuuugh, but it's sooo heavy that I'm probably going to leave it behind)
I'm missing poetry. But the poetry I want is so random. I'll have a line of something stuck in my head, and I'll get out of bed to look it up. Usually it's Eliot or Auden, but not always. So how do I pack for that?
Am I missing anything?
But it's more than an intellectual thing with me. As I was thinking about this list and flipping through the pages of some of the books I have read before, I found myself seeing again the last occasion I had to read them. In the pages of my copy of Euclid's Elements, I found tons of scrawled margin notes that didn't necessarily relate to the propositions. Little clever or funny things my classmates and tutor had said, reminders and lists of things to do, and random thoughts about Sophocles danced up and down the page next to doodles of sad clowns (an illustration my friends and I used to personify the reductio ad absurdum). In another book, I found a handful of doodles of stick figures playing in the snow, undoubtedly sketched as my thoughts drifted in class to the weather outside. In another, I had tucked a separate piece of paper covered in notes and questions focusing on a notion that would later turn into my freshman essay. Exclamation points and excited scrawl are all over all my books, and encountering these messages from my personal past is enthralling.
It is not only a younger version of myself that I encounter in these books. Some of my dearest friends, the people I love the most, pop out of these pages. Sometimes I come to a passage in a text and am overwhelmed by the memory of my friends and I laughing about it while doing the reading out on the quad, or wondering over it in Seminar, or laboring over it next to that blackboard up on the top floor of the Barr-Buchanan Center. Sometimes these passages bring one person back to me, and sometimes they bring many. But they are always a reminder of the people I have met and loved so far in life, of the things we shared in speech. And then my thoughts turn to the new books, the ones I haven't read yet. I wonder whose words I will record in their pages, who will share the jokes and the discoveries and the wonder of these books with me?
I’m being a little sentimental, I know. But you should be nice to me, because I leave the continent in nine days. Yeesh.
And while I’m at it, I thought of a phrase I like to talk about going from St. John's College to the Peace Corps: "Going from the life of the mind to the life of the hands and heart." Cheesyawesomegoodness.
*****
And now, The Book List. Of course, I'm going to be adding and subtracting from this list a fair bit in the next few days, but just in case you're as obsessive about reading as I am, here you go....
Books I'm reading now and hoping to finish before departure, but might end up coming along for the ride:
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha (If I finish in time, I'll send it to my dad. Hi, Dad!)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame (a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, who is becoming something of a hero of mine -- he was into Kant and the United Nations! like me! yeah!)
The real list (sort of kinda maybe):
Kant, Metaphysics of Morals
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves
Proust, Swann's Way
Love in the Time of Cholera, possibly other stuff by Marquez too
Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (I acquired a soft, squishy spot for this guy back in the days of freshman lab class)
Plato, The Republic - The Joe Sachs translation!
Thoreau, Walden
The Bible -- RSV, the version I read in sophomore year at SJC. Not as a person of faith, so much as a person who likes reading Job and some other bits quite a lot. Plus, as with any book I read at SJC, my margin notes will be a constant source of amusement/horror/humility.
Lonely Planet's guide to Senegal
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (it makes me squirm, and it touches on some stuff I've been thinking about a lot lately)
Guns, Germs, and Steel (started, never finished)
The Pleasures of Exile, by George Lamming. I don't know anything about this book.
Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. See my first blog entry for some background on my ridiculous crush on Paul Farmer.
And in a true nod to SJC, two books I want to work through again:
Euclid's Elements (ugh, but it's so heavy)
The Greek manual (uuuugh, but it's sooo heavy that I'm probably going to leave it behind)
I'm missing poetry. But the poetry I want is so random. I'll have a line of something stuck in my head, and I'll get out of bed to look it up. Usually it's Eliot or Auden, but not always. So how do I pack for that?
Am I missing anything?
Monday, February 9, 2009
Most. Important. Thing. Ever.
If someone could help me learn how to whistle before I leave the States, I would be seriously grateful. Like, bake-you-a-pie grateful. Or name-a-baby-elephant-after-you grateful.
Come on, guys. This is important!
Come on, guys. This is important!
Friday, February 6, 2009
Dumb things make me super happy.
So I am a huge sucker for coincidences. Not that I have any particular way of viewing them: they could be messages from God or the universe anonymously patting me on the back and saying, "Go get 'em, girl!" or just, you know, things co-inciding, i.e., falling together. I don't know. I just think they're sweet.
Also, I hate flying. If I thought the Peace Corps would let me float to Africa on a little wooden raft, I'd do it so much more happily.
And finally, my birthday is April 5th, 1986. Or 4/5/86. Or 4586, if you're just not that into punctuation.
Before this risks looking like one of those littles memes floating around on Facebook ("25 Totally Absolutely Random Things I Just Happened to Unconsciously Choose that Happen to Make Me Look Mysterious, Sexy, and Smart"), I'll get to my point.
The Peace Corps is flying this new batch of Senegal volunteers from New York City to Dakar. We'll be all snuggled together on flight... 4586.
Lovely.
On an unrelated note, I'd like to give you some statistics:
Percentage of posts in which I mention elephants, St. John's, Kant, Plato, or anything else I'm obsessed with: 0
Percentage of posts which are, in fact, lectures: 50% (Listen, all I'm saying is, it could be worse, because:)
Percentage of the time when I feel the urge to lecture the people around me about elephants, St. John's, Kant, Plato, etc.: 100%
See, guys? Personal growth!
Laterz.
Also, I hate flying. If I thought the Peace Corps would let me float to Africa on a little wooden raft, I'd do it so much more happily.
And finally, my birthday is April 5th, 1986. Or 4/5/86. Or 4586, if you're just not that into punctuation.
Before this risks looking like one of those littles memes floating around on Facebook ("25 Totally Absolutely Random Things I Just Happened to Unconsciously Choose that Happen to Make Me Look Mysterious, Sexy, and Smart"), I'll get to my point.
The Peace Corps is flying this new batch of Senegal volunteers from New York City to Dakar. We'll be all snuggled together on flight... 4586.
Lovely.
On an unrelated note, I'd like to give you some statistics:
Percentage of posts in which I mention elephants, St. John's, Kant, Plato, or anything else I'm obsessed with: 0
Percentage of posts which are, in fact, lectures: 50% (Listen, all I'm saying is, it could be worse, because:)
Percentage of the time when I feel the urge to lecture the people around me about elephants, St. John's, Kant, Plato, etc.: 100%
See, guys? Personal growth!
Laterz.
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